If your diet could use a veggie boost, try shrinking your produce. Cooking can reduce the volume of your vegetables by as much as 80%, which sure makes getting them down the gullet much easier. Take spinach for example: One cup of fresh sautéed spinach (which is very tasty, by the way) is equal to nearly five cups of raw spinach. So instead of forcing down forkful after forkful of a raw spinach salad, you could be easily slurp down almost 300 mg of folate and more than 11,000 mcg of beta carotene of the cooked stuff.

Not only will cooking your veggies help you get more of the good stuff down in one sitting, it also helps release many of the nutrients found in the foods. For example, cooked tomatoes are a more concentrated source of vitamin C and lycopene, an important phytochemical for fighting prostate cancer. One cup of cooked broccoli actually has three times as much fiber as the same serving size of raw broccoli. Just be sure when you cook your veggies, you don’t use too much water. Steam your veggies to avoid nutrients being lost in the cooking water, or cook them into soups so you end up drinking the broth. Get clever with how you eat your veggies, and you’ll outsmart your picky side every time.

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